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Interview with Tom McCarthy

For those expecting him to be, as the New Statesman called him, ‘the most galling interviewee in Britain’, Tom McCarthy is something of a disappointment. Before meeting him, I read interviews that cast him in a role as the scourge of contemporary aesthetic values.

In my imagination, he morphed into an intellectual ogre, with volumes of literary theory for fists, battering away at the sort of contemporary fiction that gathers under Christmas trees and gets Hollywood studio executives wondering where they’ll put the awards. But in person McCarthy is funny and friendly, open-minded and unassuming. The ogre is unfortunately absent. He has a boyish exuberance that’s less like an ogre and more like Tintin, who formed the subject of his second book, Tintin and the Secret of Literature.

McCarthy has since followed Tintin on a variety of fictional adventures. He has delved into crypts in C, dabbled with art forgers in Men in Space, and transmitted coded radio signals in his position as General Secretary of the International Society of Necronauts. Perhaps he is galling. Perhaps I was the victim of a scam. Since June, McCarthy has been sending imposters to deliver the Necronautical Society’s ‘Declaration on Inauthenticity’. Actors in Greece and Shanghai have posed as the author. Maybe he has started sending them to interviews as well. With the media interest that inevitably followed C’s nomination for the Man Booker Prize, who could blame him? What follows is hopefully a transcript of a conversation with the real McCarthy that took place in London’s Barbican last December.

Q

The White Review

— I read your book about Tintin first, and I was introduced to your work through that. But what’s the real order in which the books were written?

A

Tom McCarthy

— Remainderwas published first, but I wrote Men in Spacebefore that. I was living in Prague during my early twenties, where Men in Space takes place, and I had this tiny writing grant which you could still get in those days. There, I wrote a novella that was all about forgery and about doubles, which are ideas that you find again and again in Tintin. But it’s not just Hergé – it’s Derrida and Joyce as well. One of the main characters in Finnegans Wake is a forger. So I wrote this novella – I was learning to write – and that led onto Men in Space, which I started when I was about 27.

Q

The White Review

— Was Men in Space consciously reworking the plot in Hergé’sThe Broken Ear?

A

Tom McCarthy

— The core plot ofMen in Space is more or less lifted straight from The Broken Ear. I’ve learnt so much about writing from Hergé – about narrative, just straight up narrative. Once, at the age of about 22 I sat down and tried to write out the plot of The Broken Ear, which involves lots of doublings, feints and switcheroos. I must have read it already twenty-five times at that point and probably a hundred times now and I still couldn’t summarise it– it’s so complex, so clever.

After writing Men in Space,I ran into the publishing industry, which was like a big brick wall. Then I wrote Remainderand again no one would take it. Then, more and more, I found myself doing art projects, under the aegis of the International Necronautical Society (INS).

Q

The White Review

— What is that?

A

Tom McCarthy

— About ten years ago, I was very interested in the art manifesto as a literary form. It’s a wonderful form and it belongs to a particular era. It’s the early twentieth century really – a time of revolution, where political and aesthetic radicalism were going hand in hand.

But I was interested in how the art manifesto might play out now. It seems like nowadays you could only have an inauthentic or an ironic version. So I wrote this pastiche-manifesto, which the art world picked up quite quickly, and that led to exhibitions, residencies and the like. I appointed INS committees and subcommittees. The INS became a structure. I call it a ‘fiction’ – not that it isn’t real, but because it’s a construct that not only references but also cannibalises a whole bunch of other cultural moments – the avant-garde, the bureaucracy of Kafka, the secret networks of Burroughs.

Q

The White Review

— Didn’t the INS also recreate the House of Un-American Activities?

A

Tom McCarthy

— Yes. We used the format. We worked with a great set designer – Laura Hopkins from the English National Opera – and recreated the layout of space in some detail, and interrogated other artists and writers within that set-up. After that, the INS started really taking off – people were asking us to come and do shows and the Arts Council were offering us money – but I’d never set out to be an artist. I was even telling people, ‘It’s not art’. But, as a result, I ended up with a blooming art career that I never wanted. And no literary career that I did want.

Q

The White Review

— So the INS was a kind of literary endeavour that got out of hand?

A

Tom McCarthy

— Yes. It’s a literary endeavour that got out of hand. That’s a good way of putting it. But it seems to me that art is now the place where literature can happen. Almost all the concerns of the INS come from literature, but art has provided the place for it to unfold.

Q

The White Review

— Do you feel more comfortable in the art world now than in the literary one?

A

Tom McCarthy

— To some extent. The art world is definitely the more literate place. There’s definitely a more intelligent set of conversations around culture and around literature going on in the art world. In the art world, people look outwards. If you go to an art symposium, there’ll often be a philosopher, a psychoanalyst, an economist, as well as visual artists and writers there. It’s a space where all these different things are being plugged into one another. Literature has definitely migrated there. If you look at several art presses, like Sternberg or Bookworks, they’re the guys who are publishing the most interesting new writing at the moment.

Q

The White Review

— And that’s how Remainderended up getting published.

A

Tom McCarthy

— Yes. I met Clementine Deliss and Thomas Boutoux, who ran Metronome Press. They wanted to re-enact what the Olympia Press had done in the 1950s. That was how Nabokov and Burroughs and all these writers who no other publisher would touch first got into print. The guy who owned Olympia, Maurice Girodias, made his money from pornography. He was making money from the porn and at the same time publishing cutting-edge literature at a loss. So he tried to bring his audience together by making pullouts that had porn on one side and extracts from the novels on the other. On one side you’d have a naked girl up a ladder, and on the other side you’d have Molloy. Now, you read Beckett or Nabokov in austere critical editions with an introduction and all that stuff, but that was the original context.

So, Metronome Press was commissioning artists to do pornography and at the same time looking to publish small novels. It wasn’t quite the same because these artists were making more what you’d call erotic art. It wasn’t functioning as pornography (the economics were different for a start: the money came from art institution grants, not horny punters), which is kind of a shame, but it matched up. So Metronome published Remainder. It was only for sale in art shops, but it started getting a lot of publicity and there were bookshops calling up and asking to order it. Clementine wouldn’t let them. Metronome were adamant that this was an art project, not a book publisher.

Q

The White Review

— How did you feel about that? Were you angry?

A

Tom McCarthy

— No. I think it was the right thing. I mean there was a moment, maybe, when I… but then Alma got it and Vintage got it and it was published more widely. It was good to have someone saying, ‘No, there will be another edition for that, this edition is another sort of thing’.

Q

The White Review

— But how confident were you that there would be another edition?

A

Tom McCarthy

— I just thought it would get out there, in some way. I was looking at the publishing history of some of my literary heroes. No publisher would ever touch Joyce. Beckett, Burroughs, Nabokov – Kafka’s Metamorphosissold eleven copies, of which Kafka bought ten. Apparently he became obsessed with the question of who bought the eleventh copy. He was totally paranoid about it and his worst fear was that it had gone to his father. But he never found out. That would be a good literary mystery to solve – ‘Who bought the eleventh copy?’

Q

The White Review

— How did you come to write Tintin and the Secret of Literature?

A

Tom McCarthy

— Simon Critchley, my friend and Chief Philosopher of the INS, was asked by Granta to edit a series called ‘How to Read’ – you know, ‘How to Read Hegel’, ‘How to read Marx’ – and so he suggested I do one of the authors. He said ‘Do you want to do Freud or Derrida or something?’ and I said, ‘Actually I’d like to write about Tintin.’ And Granta said, ‘Hmmm, well that’s not really going to work in the How to Read series, but why don’t you do it anyway? We’ll promote it into a stand-alone book’. And that worked out a whole lot better. I’d always wanted to write about Hergé, but I thought I’d get to do it when I was sixty and had written seven or eight novels and had earned myself the indulgence to do it. But as it happens that was the first book deal I had.

Q

The White Review

— How did the Hergé foundation take to the book? They’re famously protective of Tintin and, well, you’re quite rude about them in a way.

A

Tom McCarthy

— Well they tried to stop the book. I mean they’re – it’s not a word I can use in an interview – but they really really are. I met the guy who’s in charge there and he’s this man who at the age of 35 or so went and married Hergé’s widow. The thing about them is that, like the estates of Lichtenstein or Warhol, they apply intellectual property laws in such a way that if they had been enforced like that while the artist was alive the works wouldn’t even exist! Half of Hergé is theft. He steals left, right and centre.

Q

The White Review

— Like the way he copied images from photos?

A

Tom McCarthy

— Oh, everyone does that. Or uses some kind of document to work from. I can’t imagine writing descriptive passages any other way. You’d have to have some kind of autistic total recall memory. When I was writing that bit in Remainderwhere he re-enacts the man’s death in the street, I would walk around with a Dictaphone recording where the potholes were and what the letters were on a manhole cover. For Ulysses, Joyce got his brother Stanislaus to measure the distance between the railings on such and such a street and to throw a piece of paper into the river and work out how fast it went.

Hergé spent loads of time doing that – lifting images from magazines or getting assistants to photograph locations. I was thinking of the more blatant thefts. There was already an illustrated character by Benjamin Rabier called ‘Tintin’ with the quiff and a dog, so to publish a book called ‘Tintin’ in the late twenties is an unashamed re-use of a figure that people already knew. But with the fetish of originality all that gets written over.

There was an exhibition at the Barbican about a decade ago of Francis Bacon’s raw materials. He had all these newspaper clippings he’d torn out and doodled on. There was a photo of a bowler running up to bowl and Bacon had exploded his head backwards. You can see that it’s where The Screaming Pope comes from. Apparently his estate tried to prevent the exhibition from happening because they wanted people to think that these ideas came from nowhere. It’s a weird denial that art comes from material.

Q

The White Review

— Why is that?

A

Tom McCarthy

— I think it’s because of this whole ideology of the self and self-expression that’s taken over mainstream thinking on artistic creation – that all the work proceeds from a self that pre-exists any other work. And that this is an expression of this thing called ‘The Genius’. But it’s utter crap.

Q

The White Review

— Let’s talk about C. I made the mistake of reading reviews before reading the book and ended up thinking that it didn’t sound like the sort of book I’d want to read. But then when I did get round to reading it I found it was a completely different book to the one that had been presented in the reviews. Does that affect you? Misreadings by the press?

A

Tom McCarthy

— It does affect you in as much as you end up spending a lot of mental energy having arguments in your head with idiots. It’s a big waste of time. It’s not just the hostile misreadings: lots of reviewers loved the book, but basking in their approbation would be just as crippling. I see why some authors kind of disengage with the media. It’s not snobbery, it’s not arrogance, it’s just trying to claw back some space and time to actually work.

Q

The White Review

— Was C conceived as a much bigger book?

A

Tom McCarthy

— Well, compared to Against the Dayor Infinite Jest, it’s a tiddler. But sure, it’s got a much more epic scope than the previous books I’ve done and, in one sense, a very conventional narrative arc – a cradle to grave, nineteenth-century bildungsroman. But to me that was a kind of Trojan horse. When I had the idea for it (which was way before I actually started it), none of my books had gone anywhere and I was very aware of the need for camouflage in order to get a book published.

By the time it was actually ready, things had totally changed and Remainderhad taken off, so there were several publishers fighting for the rights to it. But having said that, I like narrative arcs and evenRemainder’s got a very classical narrative arc. I think they all have. They’re all about the death drive basically.

Q

The White Review

— Were you actually thinking about camouflaging the book while you were writing it?

A

Tom McCarthy

— I don’t think so, after all. I had the idea while I was setting up a project called ‘Calling All Agents’ at the ICA. I was reading about Alexander Bell and Marconi and early radio and all these motifs kept coming back. Particularly dead siblings. Every inventor of communications technology – they’ve always got a dead sibling.

Then I was reading Ada by Nabokov, which is a book about incest and telecommunications. Nabokov claimed that he never read Freud and that he hated him, but I’m convinced there’s a lot of ‘The Wolf-Man’ in Ada. And right near the beginning there’s all this Egyptian imagery and Nabokov describes trunks in an attic as being like sarcophagi. So I started thinking about Carter and Carnarvon, who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, which is another incestuous family crypt. And suddenly I got the idea, crystal clear, to write this kind of overlay of ‘The Wolf-Man’ and Carnarvon and Carter and Bell and Marconi. All these things came together and I saw the whole arc. So I don’t think it was deliberate to make it conventional or publishable. It just came like that and I thought, ‘This one will go – somebody’s got to publish this’. Because it ticks the boxes of being conventional and it even looks like it’s historical.

It would have been conceivable to play out the concerns of Cthrough some sort of much more avant-garde and experimental format. There are artists doing exactly that and it’s great, but it’s not what I wanted to do. I believe in narrative. And anyway, I’d kind of already done that with ‘Calling All Agents’.

Q

The White Review

— What was that?

A

Tom McCarthy

— It was an INS project. We were transmitting radio signals around the world. The gallery in the ICA looked and functioned like the lair of a James Bond villain. There was a massive map on the wall and we had people going up ladders putting in drawing pins to show where the signals were being retransmitted in Chicago or Latvia or wherever.

The idea for that came from a combination of Cocteau’s film Orphéeand Leo Marks, who wrote the script for Peeping Tom. When the British were parachuting agents into the occupied territories with radio transmitters, Leo Marks – who was this code genius, aged only about 24 – came up with the idea to transmit code embedded in lines of poetry. He started out by giving the agents lines of Shakespeare and Browning, but then the Germans started doing crash courses in English literature. In response, Marks started writing his own poem code, which wouldn’t be there for the enemy to look up, and teaching these lines to the agents.

He wrote a brilliant autobiography called Between Silk & Cyanide, where he says that, as he was teaching these people the code, he thought he was killing them. That was true, in a way, because their life expectancies were about 6 weeks. As soon as they started transmitting, the Germans would hunt down their signal and home in on them and pull them in for torture, which is why they had cyanide.

That’s where he had the idea for Peeping Tom– the idea of looking at someone and killing them. But I think he wrote the wrong movie. The movie he should have written is The Conversation by Coppola. That would’ve made more sense. Anyway, all that stuff is very much behind C: transmission, codes, desire and death. I just swapped World War Two for World War One.

Q

The White Review

— The Gene Hackman character in The Conversationis like the wire tap operator in Men in Space. Serge in Cspends his childhood tuning into radio frequencies. And in Tintin and the Secret of Literature, you talk a lot about Tintin deciphering radio transmissions at the beginning of The Blue Lotus.

A

Tom McCarthy

— He’s tracking down those unknown signals. And in Tintin, as in C, those cryptic signals always lead to the crypt.

Q

The White Review

— It makes me think of something you wrote about the writer being like a wireless, receiving transmissions.

A

Tom McCarthy

— Yes. It’s there in those scenes inC where Serge is just going through the dial on the old radio and tuning in – whether it be local chitter-chatter, or radio stations as far away as Africa – and imagining these deserts and the camels bearing silk and sherbert. He’s not an artist, he’s just a kid, but that was a kind of mise-en-abîme – a miniature within the book of what the whole book is. He is, to me, an emblem of the writer: someone who receives, first and foremost, and re-transmits, but he’s not the origin of the message. He’s the transcriber, the filter.

Q

The White Review

— Serge is a character who absorbs everything around him.

A

Tom McCarthy

— He absorbs and filters. Like Bloom in Ulysses, he’s a kind of prism. Or Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow. Or Tristram Shandy. Or Candide. They’re secondary. They’re passive. They’re sounding-boxes for what’s around them.

I was probably about 18 or 19 when I read Ulyssesand that taught me how to write. As Leopold Bloom wanders around town, you get his complete thought processes, but it’s threaded through the whole city. What Joyce is doing is creating electricity. He’s wiring a whole territory – both the book and the city – with these connections and nodes and transfers and switches. Everything becomes this huge network in which any division between outer space and inner space collapses. There’s a total consistency and continuity. And I love that – it’s what life is actually like. It’s what literature should try and somehow produce.

Q

The White Review

— It’s intriguing that some of the reviews seemed to think it was unreasonable to call Serge a character. Why do you think this dichotomy between ‘flat’ and ‘rounded’ characters prevails?

A

Tom McCarthy

— It’s just total illiteracy. It’s cultural myopia. When those people say ‘rounded’ character they mean contemporary English middlebrow fiction’s version of a character. Characters in proper literature have always been ruptured, networked, inauthentic. That’s what Hamlet is. Or Don Quixote. Or Tristram Shandy. He doesn’t even appear in the book until two-thirds of the way through. It’s all about mediation and language. This is what makes, and has always made, character in the novel. So to complain that there are no proper characters in Cjust seems slightly absurd. It just shows what a massive schism there is now between what I’d call a recognisable literary – I don’t want to use the word ‘tradition’ – but a literary genealogy, on the one hand, and commercial middlebrow fiction on the other. They’re so far apart. I don’t really see any common ground.

Q

The White Review

— There’s an assumption that what’s perceived as a ‘rounded’ character is more realistic, when in fact it’s a complete contrivance. It just means you’ve described his jacket and given him a beard. In a way, although there may not be any particular drive towards realism in your work, the way that Cis immersed in Serge’s thought process is more authentic.

A

Tom McCarthy

— This is another thing. Even Balzac knows that realism is a construction – that’s what Sarrasineis all about. It’s about the constructedness of the natural and how everything that we take to be natural is in fact artificial. Nineteenth-century realists knew that what they were doing was a convention. To lose sight of that is catastrophic. It’s crazy.

Q

The White Review

— Isn’t that idea of constructing or reconstructing reality what’s at the heart of Remainder?

A

Tom McCarthy

— Yes. Often when I’m doing a reading of it and I have to explain what it’s about I say, ‘the hero builds a film set, but there’s no film’. Žižek writes about this a lot. He’s really into these Mexican soap operas that are turned over so fast the actors don’t have time to learn their lines. They wear earpieces and the producers feed them a line half a second or so before they say it. The idea is that it’s a completely constructed thing with this vast machinery behind it, but the veneer is of absolute authenticity and self-expression. Žižek’s whole point is that the more constructed something is, the more it will present itself as natural and as an expression of a separate self. Remainderis like a Mexican soap opera set, with the main character ordering everybody about over walkie-talkies.

Q

The White Review

— It’s all about that effort to repeat an event and to reconstruct that feeling of authenticity.

A

Tom McCarthy

— It’s like a children’s game. How many times in the playground did you re-enact scenes from Star Wars? Or act out Zidane or Keegan, or whoever it happens to be, scoring a goal? And then do it again and again and again and in slow-motion. That’s what kids do. I’m really into repetition. I’m not into the idea of change or progress at all.

Q

The White Review

— Or if you watch kids TV. It’s all based on repetition isn’t it?

A

Tom McCarthy

— Yes. That’s what I loved about the Teletubbies. When it just repeats all over again. But Teletubbiesis all about transmission really. They get the signal in their stomach, which is interesting. While I was writing C, I read this book called Aberrations of Mourning by Laurence Rickels. There’s one bit where he talks about Cargo Cults among South Pacific islanders. During World War Two their islands were requisitioned by the Americans, who built runways and flew in all kinds of things the islanders had never seen before – fridges, radios, tinned food. The Americans had control towers and people with ping pong bats waving the planes in. Then, once the war ended, they disappeared. So the islanders built runways and control towers out of wicker and adopted these rituals of waving ping pong bats in a particular way because they thought that would make the cargo planes descend from the sky. It’s kind of beautiful.

They believed that their dead relatives had gone to a place called ‘Austalia’ sic] where they were working in factories, producing all these goods, which were then sent over in planes to their living descendants. But the white men, having better radio equipment, intercepted the signals and diverted the planes to their own runways. Which is completely socially and economically true. These islanders have a shamanic priest caste who are equipped with special receiving equipment inside their bodies. So they can pick up their dead ancestors’ communications in their stomach. That idea is really important to the Magic Mountain section of C. Serge has this bilious stomach condition that’s really related to the death of his sister Sophie. Just like the Teletubbieswhen they get that rumbling in their stomach. Sorry, that was a huge digression on the Teletubbies.

Q

The White Review

— Would you like to write for children’s television?

A

Tom McCarthy

— I’d love to. In another life. I don’t think I’d be offered in this one.

Q

The White Review

— So instead you’re off to New York to teach at Columbia.

A

Tom McCarthy

— Yes. The course I’m teaching is called ‘Spacings’ and the proposition behind the course is that literature can be understood as a process of producing space, and spaces, whether they be urban or domestic spaces, or political spaces, or metaphysical spaces. We’re going to try and look at certain texts and map them.

In the Oresteia, for example, you’ve got the court and you’ve got Troy somewhere off in the distance, and the play starts with an account of a signal crossing space. Then you’ve got the Heavens, where the gods live, which is connected to the space of the court, which is connected to Athens, the political space where the new social order will emerge. I think it would be interesting to map this out.

Or, in The Sound and the Fury, the first section of that book is just Benjy moving around the family lot and each corner of it triggers a memory that he then recounts. I’ve taken it apart and I’ve worked it out and there are roughly twelve episodes that occur in different periods. So we’re going to try and map that. While I write, I tend to draw out of lots of maps of where scenes are happening. Otherwise you get things wrong.

Q

The White Review

— Did you ever think of publishing those maps with the books?

A

Tom McCarthy

— No. I wrote the introduction for the English edition of Jealousyby Robbe-Grillet, and that begins with a map. I don’t think it’s in the French version. When I first read Robbe-Grillet I had to make maps just to understand it. I literally had to draw out the floor space.

Interestingly, I remember going to a lecture by my mother years ago where she showed a picture of Nabokov’s copy of Northanger Abbey. The first thing he’d done opposite the title page was to draw a floor-plan of the space in order to understand how it all fit together.

The German edition of Remainderhas a really good cover that’s a forensic diagram of the shooting the hero becomes obsessed by, with arrows of who moves where in the street. They’re interesting forensic diagrams. They’re beautifully scary. It’s the relationship between space and the violent event and the record of it. That’s hopefully what this Columbia course will be all about. I’m not teaching people how to write, we’re just doing an experiment together. I don’t think I can teach anyone how to write, and I’m sure that I don’t even know myself.

Q

The White Review

— What you’re saying makes me think of the diagrams they do in newspaper reports of football matches, where they map out the events that lead to the goal…

A

Tom McCarthy

— Yes. That’s the sort of thing.

Q

The White Review

— What’s the one they do for cricket to track the trajectory of each shot?

A

Tom McCarthy

— The Wagon Wheel. That’s really good. I recently got the chance to interview the cricket commentator Henry Blofeld as part of the Serpentine Gallery’s Poetry Marathon. They asked me if I’d like be in dialogue with someone and I instantly said Henry Blofeld. Because I thought, in terms of the origins of poetry – I mean for Homer, there’s a two-part structure. There’s an event – the battles outside of Troy – and then there’s the describing of it. The modern equivalent of that idea of the poet would not be the nice little mannered Faber & Faber versifier – it’d be the sports commentator. That’s the closest thing. Also I just really wanted to meet Henry Blofeld. We had this great dialogue. He’s a lovely man, and he’s an interesting character. He was going to be the greatest batsman of his generation. When he was a teenager, he was the first schoolboy to score a double century at Lords or something. And then, aged 17, he got hit by a bus. He got knocked off a bicycle by a double-decker bus and he was in a coma. He recovered, but he lost a degree of hand eye co-ordination and couldn’t play anymore. So now, instead of playing the game, he comments on it. He’s watching his own past-future that never happened. It’s quite moving. All this lyrical description in the commentary is a kind of mournful elegy.

The most interesting thing he told me was about the origins of the first England tour to Australia. Some soap company were going to send Dickens on a sponsored reading tour of Australia. Dickens pulled out at the last minute and the sponsor who’d set up all these gigs was left terribly embarrassed and said to the Australians, ‘We’re terribly sorry that Dickens can’t come and there’s no other writer of his stature to take his place, so why don’t we send you a cricket team instead?’ So right from the off, cricket is a stand-in for literature. It’s just literature by other means.

Have you seen Zidane? The movie?

Q

The White Review

— No?

A

Tom McCarthy

— It’s really good. Because most of the time he isn’t actually doing anything, he’s just waiting for the event. That’s what I love about cricket. There’s something about it that’s pure phenomenology. Sometimes I look at it and I think, ‘How can this not be German?’ It’s all about death and the event and waiting for the event and the event coming and being repeated and replayed. In German the word for event, or at least the one that Heidegger uses, is Ereignis, which also means arrival. So it’s about waiting, which is why I’m saying cricket is so perfect. It’s about the arrival, that never quite arrives.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

Tom McCarthy is an English novelist and author of Tintin and the Secret of Literatureand three novels, Remainder, Men in Space and C. He was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize and, in his capacity as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society, has put on events at art galleries all over the world.